in the wake of MOOC hype, what shall we talk about?

So, the Typhoid Mary of education disruption, Sebastian Thrun, has admitted that venture capital interests are not well-suited to the complex structural realities of public education, and moved on to professional and corporate training.

Yes, we need to talk about venture capital’s incursion into education, even at the corporate training level. And we also need to talk about what it means to pitch the promise of education as social mobility in a society where the promise of jobs is actually pretty scant. We need to talk about academic labour in higher ed’s increasingly adjunctified system. We need to talk about the ways in which institutional higher ed both supports and penalizes students, by nature of its systemic structure. We need to talk about pedagogies for utilizing the internet to teach cheaply and widely. We need to talk about the fact that Udacity was allowed to conduct its Silicon Valley-style “fail fast” experiment on public (and largely minority) students at San Jose State. All of these are connected conversations, broadly.

But if the “solution” of venture capital MOOCs is off the table, maybe we can stop getting mired in the plate of shiny red herring it pretends to offer to all these real issues, and actually work on them. Maybe across some of the fault lines the hype has created.

To me, Thrun’s change of course changes the whole discussion, because it forces the flaming hype of MOOCs as replacements for systemic education to separate into the multiple conversations that have been conflated under that rhetoric for more than a year. Udacity’s about-face may not prove the VC model for education won’t work, but it sure lays out the fundamental disconnects between shareholder accountability and messy public education real nice.

Let’s talk about that.

Yesterday’s news might even mean we stop talking about MOOCs at all, since Thrun’s putting distance between his new initiatives and the word (Rolin Moe looks at this and the whole Udacity announcement in far more complexity here). Makes sense. By definition, corporate training is structured to be neither massive – even in possibility, as it’s bounded by the corporation’s limits of who belongs and who qualifies – nor open.

…And in terms of what I think MOOCs are, here’s a taste of a small, semi-open one I’ve really enjoyed being a part of this past week.

I’m one of the facilitators and participants in the #wweopen13 MOOC on Online Instruction for Open Educators. I’m teaching a short conceptual-ish introduction to the idea of networked identities, for people interested in teaching online.

What do identities have to do with teaching online? I think of identities as being at the centre of networked participation, and the ethos of participation that Lankshear and Knobel emphasize as one of the key “new literacies” for moving beyond just tossing paper-based educational materials onto a computer. Networks are at the centre of online interaction.

(This isn’t to say we don’t have networks in our f2f worlds and lives – families are, broadly speaking and in the extended sense, networked systems that we’re webbed into).

But to the extent to which online engagement differs from f2f, it’s the networked aspects of identity and the ways in which digital technologies shape networked identity that can make an online learning experience very different from just transporting a paper syllabus to screen. In online networks, we rely on identity profiles and practices to understand who is present alongside us and whether we want to engage with them. Others read our identity signals to make the same decisions about us.

Yet the institutional structures and norms that dominate our society and particularly our education system do not foster networked identities. In the midst of all the pressure for educators to somehow prepare students for this mythical “21st century” we seem to be both living in yet still casting as the eternal and exotic future, the whole fact that schooling practices are broadly structured to create herd identities of compliance and uniform mastery rather than networked identities of differentiation is…well…not surprising. But definitely a disconnect.

Here’s the slideshow from my live sessions this week, exploring my ever-expanding “key selves” of digital identities as well as some of the benefits and challenges of identity work as a connected educator, and a cameo from Freire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

bon

Bonnie Stewart, at your service.
My work tries to make visible who we are when we're online, and how scholars build reputations and identities in online networks.
I want to be David Bowie when I grow up.

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12 Comments →in the wake of MOOC hype, what shall we talk about?

Sounds a bit like growing pains, in which something that started out as an idea finally starts to mature and hits reality. The Fast Company article was even a little sad, and makes me think some of these great Silicon Valley dreamers have too much ego involved in their ideas, as if it either changes the world or deserves abandonment. This type of educational transformation is not going to happen in one generation, and it may not fully be realized ever, but it would be unfortunate if it is just positioned as a new profit making machine.

agreed, Neil. while Thrun *is* given to grandiose statements, i think the media has played a massive role in, as Audrey Watters points out, effectively sainting him and amplifying all his declarations as if he were the long-awaited Messiah, prophet of fixing everything. there seems to be an appetite for the narrative.

and yes, if education becomes seen as a new profit-making machine, we’re in for a world of trouble.

Like other commentators, I both like your analysis Bonnie and agree that the issue is not the end of MOOCs, much less online learning.
The hard fact is that educators have not delivered the “digital dividend” that elearning can and will provide. You don’t need to spend $50,000 a year to learn. When accreditation for learning – wherever and however it occurs happens, schools that accredit seat time, credits taken or social status of parents WILL be history and let them RIP.

I’d be excited to see that happen, Terry…though I have enough closet sociologist in me to be doubtful of all those signals of status actually disappearing without being replaced by some other markers of differences and distinction. Still. I like to think of educators and e-learning as potentially part of the same push to teach and support learners in the myriad of ways possible. Or at least, I wish we could identify our mutual goals before we start grappling with the VC question. Because I really do think the learning piece needs a clear narrative if we’re not ALL going to get bowled over by the highest bidder’s tech solutionism.